  Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-coloured sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut, The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise, By jealous moons maleficently urged To follow me forever; mountains horned With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued, Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain; And continents of serpent-shapen trees, With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league, Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire By that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers And evil kings predominantly armed With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin, whereon Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame, Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars, With foam-light songs from silver fragrance wrought, Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell, With antic gnomes abominably wise, Heave up their icy horns across my way: But naught deters me from the goal ordained By suns, and aeons, and immortal wars, And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs, By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ For ending of a brazen book; the goal Whereat my soaring ecstacy may stand, In amplest heavens multiplied to hold My hordes of thunder-vested avatars, And PromethÈan armies of my thought, That brandish claspÈd levins. There I call My memories, intolerably clad In light the peaks of paradise may wear, And lead the Armageddon of my dreams, Whose instant shout of triumph is become Immensity’s own music: For their feet Are founded on innumerable worlds, Remote in alien epochs, and their arms Upraised, are columns potent to exalt With ease ineffable the countless thrones Of all the gods that are and gods to be, Or bear the seats of Asmadai and Set Above the seventh paradise. Supreme In culminant omniscience manifold, And served by senses multitudinous, Far-posted on the shifting walls of time, With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields Of utter night and chaos, I convoke The Babel of their visions, and attend At once their myriad witness: I behold, In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell, With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat, The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list, Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs, Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives, Embrued with slobber of the basilisk, Or juice of wounded upas. And I see, In gardens of a crimson-litten world The sacred flow’r with lips of purple flesh, And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests At moonless eve in terror seek to slay, With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood That hide a hueless poison. And I read, Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, The annuling word a spiteful demon wrote With gall of slain chimeras; and I know What pentacles the lunar wizards use, That once allured the gulf-returning roc, With ten great wings of furlÈd storm, to pause Midmost an alabaster mount; and there, With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’-gut, Uplift by cranes a captive giant built, They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird, And plucked, from off his sabre-taloned feet, Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood, With amethysts from Mars. I lean to read, With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star, The monstrous archives of a war that ran Through wasted aeons, and the prophecy Of wars renewed, that shall commemorate Some enmity of wivern-headed kings, Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury, That bloat within the craters of the moon, And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk To pools of slime and fetor; and I know What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, Are proffered in Uranus to their gods By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate, Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor, Took root between the burnished flags, and now Hath mounted, and become a hellish tree, Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths, Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne, And strain at starting pillars. I behold The slowly-thronging corals, that usurp Some harbour of a million-masted sea, And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold— Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns The octiremes of perished emperors, And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed From a sea-deserted haven. Swifter grow The visions: Now a mighty city looms, Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar, To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned In shifting erubescence. But whose hands Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought To semblance of prodigious blooms of old, No eremite hath lingered there to say, And no man comes to learn: For long ago A prophet came, warning its timid king Against the plague of lichens that had crept Across subverted empires, and the sand Of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward; Which, slow and ineluctable, would come, To take his fiery bastions and his fanes, And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now I see a host of naked
e nadir-plunged gloom, Beyond the scope and vision of the sun, To other skies and systems. In a world Deep-wooded with the multi-coloured fungi, That soar to semblance of fantastic palms, I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break A score of trunks to powder. All unhurt, I rise, and through the illimitable woods, Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam, And see their tops that clamber, hour by hour, To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen, Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air With spreading pools of fetor, follow me Elusive past the ever-changing palms; And pittering moths, with wide and ashen wings, Flit on before, and insects ember-hued, Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom, And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard Far-off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown Resounds at measured intervals of time, Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me Beneath a pall of iris. Now the palms Grow far apart and lessen momently To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them I see an empty desert, all ablaze With amethysts and rubies, and the dust Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam, Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me With leaping waves of endless rutilance, Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom, Through which I wander, blind as any Kobold; Till underfoot the griding sands give place To stone or metal, with a massive ring More welcome to mine ears than golden bells, Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge Of a broad black plain of adamant, that reaches, Level as a windless water, to the verge Of all the world; and through the sable plain, A hundred streams of shattered marble run, And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze, Like to the ruin of all the wars of time, To plunge, with clangour of timeless cataracts, Adown the gulfs eternal. So I follow, Between a river of steel and a river of bronze, With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice From which they fall, and make the mighty sound Of a million swords that meet a million shields, Or din of spears and armour in the wars Of all the worlds and aeons: Far beneath, They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void, And vanish like a stream of broken stars, Into the nether darkness; nor the gods Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf, Will dare to know what everlasting sea Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore With mighty tides unebbing. Lo, what cloud, Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse, Is on the suns of opal? At my side, The rivers rail with a wan and ghostly gleam, Through darkness falling as the night that falls From mighty spheres extinguished! Turning now, I see, betwixt the desert and the suns, The poised wings of all the dragon-rout, Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds, Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs, And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged After the ravin of dispeopled lands, With harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell— Hot from abominable feasts and fain To cool their beaks and talons in my blood— All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear, With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms, Like pillars of embattled night and flame, Looms on the wide horizon! From the van, I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill As tempests in a broken fane, and roar Of sphinxes, like the unrelenting toll Of bells from tow’rs infernal. Cloud on cloud, They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind Falls from them like the wind before the storm. And in the wind my cloven garment streams, And flutters in the face of all the void, Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost On the Pit’s undying tempest! Louder grows The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze.— Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings, Inseparably mingled. Scarce I keep My footing, in the gulfward winds of fear, And mighty thunders, beating to the void In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee With them, and prove the nadir-founded night Where fall the streams of ruin; but when I reach The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom, To measure with my gaze the dread descent, I see a tiny star within the depths— A light that stays me, while the wings of doom Convene their thickening thousands: For the star Increases, taking to its hueless orb, With all the speed of horror-changÈd dreams The light as of a million million moons; And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed, It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face, That fills the void and fills the universe, And bloats against the limits of the world With lips of flame that open.**** |
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